Dropping the bombs, both of them, absolutely had to be done to end the war. Anyone with any doubts should read Richard Frank’s “Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire.”
The situation was that the Japanese leadership was determined to continue the war even though they had clearly been beaten. There was no real “peace movement” inside the Japanese government. The “peace feelers” supposedly being sent to the USSR were not official government spokesmen, but were functionaries in the Foreign Ministry acting without authority of the government, and had no official terms to offer. To the extent there were any terms being contemplated, they were completely unrealistic as they called for Japan to retain their overseas conquests that they still occupied. The actual texts of the cables between the Foreign Ministry in Tokyo and the ambassador in Moscow would be laughable if the situation were not so serious. Finally on that regard, we were intercepting and decoding these messages, and knew there was no legitimate peace movement in Tokyo.
The second argument Frank makes is that the invasion of Japan would have been a bloodbath, both for the Americans and Japanese, and all of this is well documented. Most American leaders did not want this to happen, for obvious reasons.
The final point Frank makes is that ironically, the bombs saved Japanese lives; literally millions of them. The American air, naval and submarine war against Japan had succeeded in full measure. The home islands of Japan had been completely shut off from any meaningful imports, not only of war material, but also of basic items such as food and coal. Japan could not produce enough food to feed their population, and none was getting through. In addition, there would be no coal for heating come winter. The food ration had already been reduced below necessary minimums by July, it would only have gotten worse in a cold winter. In addition to sealing off all external imports, Japan’s internal economic infrastructure had been destroyed or was going to be within a matter of weeks. In addition to burning out the heart of her cities, mining campaigns had shut off the internal maritime trade, and the rail links were easily severed by bombing.
Had the war continued through the winter, it is probable that millions of Japanese would have starved to death. Think of Leningrad on a national scale. And the deaths would have been proportionally greatest among the non-combatants: elderly, women, children and sick.
It may sound harsh, but we actually did them a favor by dropping the bombs.
two bombs weren’t enough....remember Pearl Harbor..the Bataan death march and more...
As we learned from the battles of Okinawa and Saipan that the civilians were willing to kill themselves rather than surrender.